A Brief History of Egypt in Caricature

“The cow is meagre, you and the British have not left any milk in it.” The cow, Egypt in the context, gaunt and human-faced, has its body burdened. And the greedy hands tugging at her udders? The imperialists.

The sharp cartoon originated in the 1880s, when Egypt was under colonial control, and it was published in Abou Naddara Zarqa. This was the first Egyptian satirical newspaper, founded in 1877 by Ya'qub Sanu', who is regarded as the father of modern Egyptian caricature. The image satirizes the greed of Egypt's foreign invaders and depicts these same invaders as sucking Egypt "dry," all under the passive (and in some cases, enabling) gaze of an Egyptian man wearing a fez who is labeled "Riaz” or “Abo Rida” and believed to be Riad Pasha, a prominent Egyptian official who served multiple terms as Prime Minister under Khedive Ismail and later Tawfiq.

According to Tamer Youssef, a caricaturist from Egypt who has practised for 37 years and thoroughly researched Ya'qub Sanu's contributions, "He (Ya'qub Sanu) brought together the three art forms - theatre, journalism, and caricature".

Sanuʿ was born in Harat al-Yahud in Cairo to an Italian-Jewish father and Egyptian-Jewish mother. He memorised the Quran by age ten, studied in Italy on a royal scholarship from Khedive Ismaʿil, and returned armed with European theatre and Enlightenment ideas. At first, he staged nationalist plays, and when those got him in trouble, he picked up a pen and started drawing.

Abou Naddara was so sharp in its criticism of Egypt’s rulers and foreign occupation that it was quickly banned. Sanuʿ fled to Paris, but kept publishing from exile.

“Ya‘qub Sanuʿ even marketed. He was the first to come up with what we’d now call a promotional editorial,” Youssef explains to CairoScene. “He wrote a full-page article where he pretends to be speaking to a friend, describing how to subscribe to Abou Naddara and receive it straight to your home by post.”

By the early 20th century, Egypt had become the caricature capital of the Arab world, with a press scene as cosmopolitan as it was somewhat fearless. Newspapers were filled with humorous depictions that combined European cartoon styles with local flair, targeting political leaders and even the caricaturists who drew them. “The image used to speak louder, faster. A caricature could shift public mood in a way no article could, and that’s what we’re seeing again today. You scroll past a thousand things, but one image or video informs your opinion before you even realise it,” Youssef says.The period between the Second World War and the Young Officers’ Revolution was a golden age for Egyptian caricature. Artists freely drew satirical pictures with political content.

At the heart of this visual rebellion stood Alexander Saroukhan, an Armenian refugee who arrived in Egypt in the 1920s and soon became one of its most influential cartoonists. With a sharp pen and witty eye, he introduced El-Masry Effendi, the top-hatted, moustachioed symbol of Egypt’s middle class. After the rise of Nasserism, the character evolved into Al-‘Arabi Effendi, paralleling the ideological shift of the era. Across hundreds of cartoons, this everyman became the country’s conflicted conscience; bewildered by modernity, burdened by hypocrisy and trying to make sense of his world.

“We had Armenian artists, Greek printers, Levantine calligraphers; it was a truly cosmopolitan scene,” says Tamer Youssef, an Egyptian Cartoonist. “Egypt was like Paris, but with a tarboush.”

As noted by Eliane Ursula Ettmüller in Caricature and Egypt’s Revolution of 25 January 2011, during the period of abundance in Egypt’s history of political satire, all public figures were targets of criticism through the visual medium of cartoons in both satirical and ‘serious’ publications, which prevented Nasser from continuing to operate unimpeded. Caricatures, once favoured by the editorial teams across all newspapers throughout the 1940s, were quickly removed from sight following the imposition of draconian restrictions upon the press by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1955.

Satirical paintings, however, continued to be produced in Egypt and evolved in a relatively short time into a more subtle expression of dissent, with the creation of a new daily publication called Akhbar al-Yawm in 1956 by the Ruz al-Yusuf Publishing House.

Cartoonists like Bahgat Osman and Ahmad Hegazi pivoted toward social critique, disguising political critique within domestic scenes and everyday struggles. Osman, for instance, contrasted the brutality of state forces with the dignity of Egypt’s rural poor, while Hegazi reimagined social archetypes to critique institutional power.

Caricaturists like Rakha, Gomaa Farahat, Salah Jahin, and Rose al-Yusuf layered social critique into character-driven satire. Their drawings, published in Arabic, French, and English papers, travelled across borders and often landed in courtrooms. People waited for the Friday cartoon like they waited for the Friday sermon.

This era was defined by mass journalistic distribution with publications like Akhbar El Youm, Rose al-Yusuf, Al-Masry, and Al-Ahram reaching millions. Caricatures became part of the national imagination.

Religious authority was not exempt from public scrutiny. The early 1960s in Egypt were marked by debates over national identity, cultural authenticity, and the boundaries of modernity. Few moments captured that tension more than the 1962 Conference of the National Forces in Cairo. It was there that Sheikh Muhammad al‑Ghazali, one of Egypt’s most prominent Islamic thinkers, took to the podium to denounce what he saw as moral laxity and the creeping influence of Western norms, particularly when it came to women’s dress and gender roles.

In response, Salah Jahin, who at the time was a leading cartoonist for Al‑Ahram, drew a series of satirical cartoons targeting al‑Ghazali’s statements and conservative views. One such cartoon shows al‑Ghazali standing on the podium, delivering his speech in an agitated state, as his white turban slips from his head. Beneath the illustration, Jahin adds his caption: “Sheikh al‑Ghazali: We must abolish from our country all laws imported from abroad, including the civil law and the law of gravity.”Jahin followed that with multiple cartoons published in Al‑Ahram in early June 1962 that lampooned al‑Ghazali’s critique of women’s clothing and his wider rhetoric, repeatedly using humour and visual metaphor to turn al‑Ghazali’s words against him.

Al‑Ghazali’s supporters from Al‑Azhar University, including students and some senior clerics, in response, marched on the Al‑Ahram building, expressing outrage at what they saw as blasphemy. Stones were thrown, and tensions ran high as protestors attempted to confront the newspaper physically over the cartoons. This editorial spat turned into a street‑level confrontation over media, symbolism, and religion. At the time, Al‑Ahram’s editor, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, stepped in publicly to defend the newspaper’s editorial independence, writing that the paper respected religion and rejected any attempts to frame the dispute as a religious insult, while also affirming freedom of expression. Heikal also published al‑Ghazali’s original speech in the paper so readers could judge for themselves.

Cartoons could stir the public and lead to calls of taking heads, and even bureaucratic reform wasn’t beyond the reach of satire. “Some contemporaries claimed that two of Jahin’s cartoons in Al‑Ahram were so resonant that they contributed to the decision to separate the post of Socialist Prosecutor General from the Minister of Justice,” Youssef says.

Satire also found itself caught in a tug-of-war between drawing for the street and drawing for the state. Some artists wielded their pens to question power while others became part of it. The story of Egyptian caricature in the 1970s is best told through two of its most iconic figures, Salah Jahin and Bahgat Osman, whose careers reveal the double life of political satire under pressure.

Salah Jahin was the palace approved parody artist, while Bahgat Osman was the rebel with a felt-tip. Both artists were immensely talented, wildly popular, and deeply influential, but the directions they took under President Sadat’s regime were so different.

By the late 1970s, Salah Jahin had become Al-Ahram’s in-house caricaturist, a position that gave him reach but also tied him closely to state narratives. In times of political upheaval (like the 1977 Bread Riots), Jahin's drawings gave voice to the same ideas put forth by the regime. In his work, Jahin painted people who were angry at the government as saboteurs and encouraged the Egyptian populace to support Sadat in the upcoming referendum, which resulted in increased executive power for Sadat and made it illegal for citizens to protest the regime. One of his most cited drawings from the period literally showed a person kicking “chaos” by voting yes.

When Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1979, the tensions between the Sadat government in Egypt and the "Rejectionists" led by Libya, Iraq, and Syria reached a peak. In the heated war of words that followed, Salah Jahin took a firm stance in support of Sadat. Bahgat Osman, by contrast, used his pen to wield cartoons that were biting, anti-authoritarian, and at odds with the ruling elite. Sadat’s policies, including the peace agreement with Israel and also his reactions to dissent, received such severe criticism from Osman that he was basically exiled throughout the 70s.In the 90s, Cartoonist Mustafa Hussein disrupted the longstanding stigma surrounding explicit political satire by drawing attention to the corrupt practices and incompetence of politicians. Through Kambura, an ignorant and boastful politician drawn by Hussein and conceptualised by Ahmed Ragab, satire shifted away from the indirect language of social grievance that had dominated earlier decades. Without naming or directly pointing to a particular political individual, Hussein was clearly stating what needed to be said about the political arena and its elitist nature. Hussain employed an indirect format, yet his message was remarkably direct – that the "political elite" had taken advantage of the citizens of Egypt through arrogance and incompetence. In one cartoon arc, Kambura attempts to run for parliament by any means necessary, even hiring professors to teach him public speaking and explain the concept of “democracy”, a word he initially mistakes for an exotic brand of caviar.

About the current state of the cartoon scene, Tamer Youssef is no illusionist. “It’s not a cultural ecosystem anymore but a closed club,” he says flatly. The problem, Youssef insists, is institutionalised gatekeeping; the same names, the same committees, the same circles. He reflects critically on how some of the previous generation’s celebrated artists, like Gomaa Farahat and Mustafa Hussein, may have contributed to limiting space for emerging voices, perhaps out of a desire to preserve the legacy and visibility they had worked hard to build. “They used to sit on the thrones of nostalgia and won’t let go,” he says. Even the Egyptian Caricature Society, once a space for artistic dialogue, is, in his words, “can be a museum of favouritism and historical revisionism.”

“Print newspapers have lost their weight,” says Tamer Youssef, “and with that, the ability to create a star cartoonist.” Today’s cartoonists find themselves sidelined by shrinking editorial space and cautious editors. “Editors-in-chief can become censors,” Youssef tells Cairoscene, “driven by fear for their positions more than any artistic standard.”

Sources: Ettmüller, E. U. (2012). Caricature and Egypt’s Revolution of 25 January 2011. Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History, 9(1). https://d-nb.info/1194370845/34 Al-Shahat, S. (2019, June 1). ذات يوم 1 يونيو 1962… «جاهين» يرد على «الغزالى» بست كاريكاتيرات ساخرة. Youm7. https://www.youm7.com/story/2019/6/1/4267786 رسام الكاريكاتير بهجت عثمان في ذكرى ميلاده: فنان يرعبه الورق. (n.d.). Sout Al-Omma. https://www.soutalomma.com/Article/814638 أشعلها الغزالي من منبر الأزهر… حكاية كاريكاتير رسمه جاهين كاد يتسبب في ثورة دينية. (2022). Veto Gate. https://www.vetogate.com/4609081 كاريكاتير صلاح جاهين في عصر السادات. (n.d.). Raseef22. https://raseef22.net/article/1091583 Egyptian caricature and political expression. (n.d.). Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/33293 Sanua (Abou Naddara) caricature archive. (n.d.). Album Online. https://www.album-online.com/detail/en/MzQ5MzY4MA